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As you may have noticed, I am posting things again on Write with Lightning after the successful conclusion of yet another journey overseas. I’ve travelled a lot, and I am always tempted immediately after a trip to write about it. I had less inclination to write a narrative of my time in Ireland because I already wrote it in my Wanderlust Ireland blog, but I still wanted to write about travel in general and my experiences as a world traveller—that is, the customs I absorb and the people whose lives I visited. I don’t have anything more profound to tell you about the famous sights I’ve seen than anyone else who has also seen them. The Eiffel Tower is brown. The Circus Maximus is a beer bottle littered field. Oscar Wilde’s grave is covered in lipstick kisses. Angkor Wat is old. Bethlehem is a slum. Continue reading

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I sit in the Cathedral centred beneath the skull at the feet of Christ’s crucifix while importance echoes from the 2000 pipes of the organ beneath the stained-glass flowered star. Oh to belong to the strength of the arches—to not be another camera toting tourist—to be here to pray—to passing kneel as daily service to something larger than the self. The chords try to draw me into the fold to pin me down—preserve me between the pages like a four-leaf clover, a trinity shamrock, a squashed spider smeared and gnarled branches of legs turned web between the window frame of stained-blood stained-glass a phallic flaming sword arousing the wrong emotions. But I am not bound to a word I do not believe exists. Angelic arms are open but they’re not looking at me—with the eyes the arms are diverted always away always to another seat. Free Hugs signs with a footnote: not for you. In the pews I look like I belong, but I don’t and I never will. The chords and arches try to shut out the world—to keep my mind within—but I am not in this Cathedral centred beneath the skull at the feet of Christ’s crucifix while importance echoes from the 2000 pipes of the organ beneath the stained-glass flowered star. I can see through them. I can fold them flat between these pages like a four-leaf clover, a trinity shamrock, a squashed spider. I can bind them without their word.

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Happy St. Patrick’s Day! Not a particularly happy poem…but happy wearing of the green to you nonetheless!

Three hundred shamrock petals tossed

Are my yearly forget-me-nots,

Decaying mulch for the next batch.

The Land of Youth a curse for me

Not in it; for me, left behind

By who, I hope, forgets me not.

The water-walking horse made both

Of us immortal: him, alive;

And me, a grey shadow, forgotten.

So should I leave the world for void,

Or wait another hundred shamrocks

To, maybe, someday be remembered?

This poem is based on the Irish legend of Oisín, who went to Tír na nÓg (Lord of the Rings Undying Lands) with the faerie queene Niamh on her badass water-walking (take that Jesus) horse Embarr (think Gold Chocobos in Final Fantasy VII). Three years in Tír na nÓg was three hundred in Ireland, so when Oisín returned, everyone he knew was dead. This poem is for those people (and sorry for all the parentheses).